In Another Place, Not Here

In Another Place, Not Here

Amazon.com ReviewThis is poet, essayist, and film-maker Dionne Brand's first novel. The same sensuous language and imagery that informs her other work is present in this story of two contemporary Caribbean women. Elizete and Verlia appear to be opposites. Elizete is a poor islander who dreams of escaping to a life of freedom and prosperity in a city. Verlia is a jaded Canadian who leaves Toronto to return to her island homeland where she hopes to find revolution and authenticity. Each woman sees her fantasy in the other, comparing their urban and rural lifestyles, material wealth and poverty, and different spiritualities. While this book is certainly about the differences between the two women's lives, it is also very much about the power of our fantasies and how we project onto people the things we want to see. Brand's supple, poetic prose is well-suited for her many-textured subject. --Rebecca BrownWhen two contemporary Caribbean women just happen to meet, an instant friendship and understanding forms as a yearning for each other's life takes them to the next stage in their own worlds.From Library JournalElizete lives on an unnamed Caribbean island and has worked the cane fields from morning to night for as long as she can remember. Given to a virtual stranger by a birth-family that could not bear another mouth to feed, she has had a life of hardship and deprivation mediated by occasional small kindnesses. Verlia, another Caribbean-born woman, fled the islands for Canada at 17 and has spent 18 years among left-wing activists hoping to foment social change. Both women share profound feelings of dislocation and disillusion, and for a brief instant?when Verlia travels to Elizete's island to participate in an incipient revolutionary effort?the two find solace in each other. While the novel follows a jagged course that delves into the tormented souls of both characters, its plot is less compelling than its poetic, dream-filled musings. Brand, a Trinidad-born filmmaker and writer living in Canada, has written a masterful, if nonlinear, expose about Caribbean poverty, cultural displacement, and human need. Both haunting and beautiful, this is recommended for most collections.?Eleanor J. Bader, New Sch. for Social Research, New YorkCopyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Kirkus ReviewsA first novel from Trinidadian-born Brand, now living in Canada, that's more prose poem than conventional fiction, unevenly evoking the relationship of two Caribbean women caught up in a revolution. The account of Elizete and Verlia's meeting, their love, and their tragic parting is told in sections that are an uneasy mix of poetic dreams on the one hand and politics on the other (Marx, Che, Fanon, and other Left-ish idols are quoted). Elizete, abandoned by her mother, begins with her memories of being brought up by a childless woman who told her stories of the slaves and their secret rebellions. When the woman died, Elizete was ``given'' to Isaiah, a brutal farmworker who beat and raped her. But her miserable life spent satisfying Isaiah by night and cutting cane by day changes when Verlia arrives from Canada. Verlia has come to organize the local cane-workers. (The island is nameless, but it's history resembles that of Grenada.) The two women fall in love, and after the uprising fails, Elizete heads to Toronto in search of Verlia, who by then has disappeared. In Toronto, she experiences anguish and repeated (and melodramatic) indignities. The rigidity of the political subtext--the wickedness of whites and the inadequacies of men--repeatedly subverts the story. After many travails, Elizete arrives at a center run by Abena, a former lover of Verlia's. Verlia, also Caribbean-born, in turn describes her feelings of alienation from her birthplace; her journey to Canada, which ended not in a college education but in service in of the political movement; the comfort of Elizete's affection; and the failure of the